After a number of devastating forest fires in the U.S. over the past few years, researchers think it might be time to create a fire-spotting satellite.
The devices would snap photos of western U.S. forests every few seconds in order to find "hot spots" where a fire could brew, a University of California, Berkeley news release reported. This could help prevent wildfires from starting in the first place.
"If we had information on the location of fires when they were smaller, then we could take appropriate actions quicker and more easily, including preparing for evacuation," fire expert Scott Stephens, a UC Berkeley associate professor of environmental science, policy and management, said. "Wildfires would be smaller in scale if you could detect them before they got too big, like less than an acre."
The researchers dubbed the prospective satellite the Fire Urgency Estimator in Geosynchronous Orbit (FUEGO); they predict it would cost several hundred million dollars to build.
"With a satellite like this, we will have a good chance of seeing something from orbit before it becomes an Oakland fire," physicist Carl Pennypacker, a research associate at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory and scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said in reference to a fire in 1991 that destroyed over 3,000 homes in the area. "It could pay for itself in one firefighting season."
Forest fire detection has not seen much improvement over the past 200 years, fire-tower lookouts and reports from the community are still the main alert system.
"Even today, most fires are detected, in some way or another, by people," Stephens said. "Even the Rim Fire near Yosemite National Park this past summer was detected by someone who saw a smoke column."
A fire-spotting satellite has always been too expensive and mistake prone to be a possibility, but new technology and design could help overcome those obstacles.
"Simply put, we believe we have shown that this kind of rapid, sensitive fire detection of areas bigger than 10 feet on a side is probably feasible from space, and we have evidence that the false alarm rate will not be crazy," Pennypacker said,. "Our work requires further testing, which we are eager to do."
The device would run on an automated system that could that compares images and looks for points of light.
"In concept, this is a simple system: a telephoto camera, an infrared filter and a recording device. We are just looking for something bright compared to the surroundings or changing over time," remote sensing expert Maggi Kelly said. "Then, we do these rapid calculations to determine if one image is different from the next."
"FUEGO is designed for early detection of smaller fires. Right now, we lose a lot of time because fires are already big by the time we see them," Kelly said.
